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The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

from-a-to-remzi.blogspot.com

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Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#21

Post by CM30 »

They should at least be free through the university, given the insane prices students paying for tuition now. Maybe it could be sold for money to those not actually attending a course on a subject, but I hear of far too many examples where it seems the lecturer/professor is basically using the students as a secondary way of making money.

And the online setup is arguably even better for the reasons noted. Perhaps in that case, paying could be something you do if you want a hard copy of the book to peruse without a computer/mobile device.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#23

Post by vonneumannstan »

CM30 wrote: post #21

They should at least be free through the university, given the insane prices students paying for tuition now. Maybe it could be sold for money to those not actually attending a course on a subject, but I hear of far too many examples where it seems the lecturer/professor is basically using the students as a secondary way of making money. And the online setup is arguably even better for the reasons noted. Perhaps in t…

Perhaps you fail to see how this would probably lead to textbooks costing even more and which will be directly passed to students as higher tuition?

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#24

Post by nosioptar »

otras wrote: post #15

Big fan of Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces and the accompanying lectures ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/537/Spring2018/Disc... ). Free, high quality learning materials like this are an absolute treasure, and without them, I wouldn't be where I am in my career today.

Used that book in OS classes, absolutely loved it.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#25

Post by rtkwe »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #14
newer_vienna wrote: post #4

Copyright stifles creative output. I believe that if we got rid of copyright (not just for textbooks), the quality and quantity of published work will increase.

Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated? Countries with weak copyright enforcement don’t tend to have better output than the US (I think most would argue it’s worse). I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.

That's an odd question to ask given the history of free media like flash games, youtube videos, deviant art/pixiv/etc, and fan fiction. Getting paid, especially enough that one can make a living off of it, for your creative work is an exception not the rule way more people create it for no money than ever make any money at all much less a living.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#26

Post by vonneumannstan »

free_bip wrote: post #8
vonneumannstan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying colleges will just increase tuition to cover the cost of textbooks right?

Or they could lay off some middle managers. If they blame the layoffs on AI the market might even reward them for it.

The market will reward colleges for layoffs?

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#27

Post by steele »

asdff wrote: post #16
steele wrote: post #13

Buying used global editions from the international students is the move for undergrads at big schools. Hardcover binding and color print were not missed and definitely not worth 10-20x more. Even published lecturers would ask students to fetch a "course pack" compilation of sloppy photocopied excerpts for purchase by on-campus print operations. Somehow this wasn't piracy. It is no secret that publishers and bookselle…

Nah, better to just pirate them and save your back.

Piracy?! What do I look like, an AI CEbro pillaging intellectual property for monopolistic commercial advantage without material consequence?!

For a time, course packs were the piracy of convenience because a PDFs with well-meaning but unreliable OCR were loaded with images (charting etc) resulting in large, difficult to navigate files even at the most eye watering, illegible compression.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#28

Post by amdsn »

The best textbooks I used in uni were either free or extremely cheap (Linear Algebra done right comes to mind, it was 30-40$, and at least the most recent edition is completely free online. I can't remember if the edition that I bought had that option). More than once I had a professor who was in the process of drafting a textbook or had already written one and it was simply given to everyone in their section for free. Paying hundreds of dollars for intro mathematics books that were glorified collections of practice problems just to get access to the online homework was insulting compared to the care put into those texts some professors gave out for free.

I wouldn't expect every professor to write their own, but I think universities should at least work on some sort of in-house solution for the intro text problem that all the instructors could use, especially public ones. It is absurd that most of those courses are structured to gate homework grades behind an expensive purchase of what is usually a sub-par text.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#29

Post by arikrahman »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #7
coeneedell wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should get paid. The press should pay them. The college pays the press. The students pay the college. The press releases information for free.

Then students will just end up paying more in tuition, possibly more than the costs of textbooks. That extra money of course will go to increasing either/both the university president's or lead football coach's salaries.

The colleges will raise tuition anyways, and they do it at a runaway cost. Might as well throw in something useful and tangible like textbooks that they can bargain wholesale with the publishers. Individually, the students can only beg.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#30

Post by agentifysh »

I recall a university in canada had professors w=usi g their textbooks they authored but each edition was exxactly the same but they would change the quiz/assignment or exam questions so you had to buy it

on top of that we had to purchase a weird accessory to answer questions electronically instead of raising hands and he was a beneficiary of the company that built it

its so corrupt these textbooks were very expensive but we use like 1% of it

then bunch of students started photocopying and selling it at 95% discount and they got arrested with full on SWAT gear

it made me question the whole higher education thing i certainly do not encourage it anymore especially with LLMs now

Unless you plan on engineering, law, medicine, actuary i just dont see the point

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